Scientific Discourse in John Donne’s
Eschatological Poetry
Scientific Discourse in John Donne’s
Eschatological Poetry
By
Ludmila Makuchowska
Scientific Discourse in John Donne’s Eschatological Poetry,
by Ludmila Makuchowska
This book first published 2014
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2014 by Ludmila Makuchowska
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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ISBN (10): 1-4438-6526-5, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-6526-5
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations .................................................................................... vii
Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Chapter One ............................................................................................... 13
Geography and Cartography
Introduction
Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward
Holy Sonnet VII
Hymn to God, my God, in my Sickness
Valediction: Of Weeping
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 53
Physics
Motion and Force
Introduction
Holy Sonnet VI
Holy Sonnet I
The Theory Of Matter And Mathematics
Introduction
A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 81
Alchemy and Chemistry
Introduction
Resurrection, Imperfect
Holy Sonnet IV
Valediction, Forbidding Mourning
A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day
vi
Table of Contents
Conclusion ............................................................................................... 117
Works Cited ............................................................................................. 123
Index ........................................................................................................ 135
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1 Lucas Cranach The Elder, The Crucifixion with the Converted
Centurion, 1536, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.
2 Isidore of Seville, “Orbis Terrae,” c. 600, reprinted in Etimologiarum
sive originum: Libri X (1911).
3 Gregor Reisch, Margarita Philosophica, 1517, plate 3.
4 Hans Memling, Salvator Mundi, 1490, The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York.
5 Sebastian Münster, “Typus Orbis Universalis,” Cosmographia, 1544.
6 Gervase of Ebstorf. The Ebstorf Mappamundi. 13th. Destroyed in
1943 in Hanover.
7 Hartmann Schedel, Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493.
8 Hereford Mappa Mundi, ca. 1300, Hereford Cathedral, England.
9 Francis Quarles, Emblems Moral And Divine, Book 4: Emblem 11,
engraved by William Marshall, London, 1635.
10 Stained glass, St. Michael Weighing a Soul, Chancel east window, St.
Michael’s church, Eaton Bishop, Herefs., England, 14th century.
11 Francis Quarles, Emblems Moral And Divine, Book 4: Emblem 11,
engraved by William Marshall, London, 1635.
12 Christopher Harvey, The School Of The Heart, Or, The Heart (of Itself
Gone Away From God) Brought Back Again To Him, And Instructed
By Him; In Forty-Seven Emblems), Emblem 42, London, 1647.
13 Woodcut 7 “The Extraction or Putrefaction of the Soul,” The Rosary of
the Philosophers (Rosarium philosophorum sive pretiosissimum donum
Dei) in De Alchimia Opuscula complura veterum philosophorum, vol.
2, Frankfurt, 1550.
14 Woodcut 12 “The Illumination,” The Rosary of the
Philosophers (Rosarium philosophorum sive pretiosissimum donum
Dei) in De Alchimia Opuscula complura veterum philosophorum, vol.
2, Frankfurt, 1550.
15 Petrus Bonus Lombardus, Margarita Preciosa Novella, Emblem 13,
ca. 1330, Venice, 1545.
16 Georgius Aurach de Argentina, “Putrefactio,” “Rosa Alba,” and “Rosa
Rubea,” Pretiosissimum Donum Dei, Strasburg: Georgium Untrach,
1475.
viii
List of Illustrations
17 Michael Maier, Symbola Aureae Mensae Duodecim Nationum,
Frankfurt am Main: Anton Humm, 1617.
18 Pseudo-Aquinas, Aurora Consurgens, from 15th-century manuscript,
Zurich Zentralbibliothek.
19 Michael Maier, Atlanta Fugiens, Emblem 21, Frankfurt, 1618.
20 Johann Daniel Mylius, “Sol Niger,” Philosophia Reformata, Frankfurt,
1622, The British Museum, London.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This manuscript would not have been possible without the guidance
and insight of Prof. Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak, whose supervision I have
been privileged to benefit from for the many years of my doctoral
program.
I want to acknowledge the staff of the Wrocław Institute of English
Studies where I was fortunate to find an intellectually stimulating and
personally appreciative environment.
My thanks to go Dennis Smith for his attentive reading and helpful
comments. David Schauffler has also been a helpful editor whose
suggestions enhanced the final form of the book.
I also want to express gratitude to my relentlessly supportive father,
Mirosław Makuchowski.
Most importantly, I wish to thank my most wonderful friends for their
encouragement and support for this project and beyond. In an alphabetical
order, I must show my heartfelt appreciation for Ania Budziak, Wojtek
Drąg, Kasia Nowak-McNeice and Patrycja Poniatowska.
And finally, I am especially indebted to Eric, who has seen me
patiently and companionably through all the difficult stages of writing this
book.
INTRODUCTION
The two most significant monographs about the influence of science on
Donne’s poetry—Charles Coffin’s John Donne and the New Philosophy,
published in 1937, and Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s The Breaking of the
Circle: Studies in the Effect of the “New Science” upon SeventeenthCentury Poetry, from 1950—happen to be the only scholarly works focused
exclusively on this field of study. On a theoretical level, both of these
publications are founded on a set of pre-Kuhnian assumptions about the
existence of a unified knowing subject and the transparent referentiality of
knowledge, so they both take possession of a reconstructionist conception
of history and they both accept a positivist model of modern science,
understood—in opposition to doctrinaire medieval science—as a
progressive accumulation of propositional truths derived from empirical
interrogation of nature. The ambit of interest in both books is limited to an
overview of astronomical and cosmological references in Donne’s The
Anniversaries and his prose works, with the omission of scientific
disciplines such as cartography, physics and alchemy, and little emphasis
placed on the reading of the Holy Sonnets, supplicatory hymns and
valedictory poems. The methodology adopted by Coffin and Nicolson
combines a source-documentary approach with the history of ideas, which
often reduces the complexity of Donne’s imagery by narrowing the
meaning of his literary art into a textual record of the scientific revolution.
As the existing research neglects certain areas of inquiry and as it is based
on presuppositions stemming from an outmoded philosophical perspective, I
believe that the subject of science in Donne’s poetry requires critical reexamination.
Marjorie Nicolson’s critical essay combines a thematic study of literary
imagination with an interdisciplinary excursion into the history of ideas in
an attempt to defend Renaissance poets’ choice of imagery against
Johnson’s famous charge of conceptual incongruity.1 This defense is built
1
Samuel Johnson wrote in The Life of Cowley (1780) that “The metaphysical poets
were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavour; but,
unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme instead of writing poetry, they only wrote
verses…[in which] the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together;
nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their
2
Introduction
on the hermeneutic ground that “many of the basic figures of speech which
Johnson and some modern critics misunderstood were drawn directly and
inevitably from a Nature … long forgotten” (5). Nicolson construes those
figures of speech to reflect certain conditioned beliefs (“habits of thought”
[126]), forged within and retrieved from the collective mental framework
of the Renaissance. Most ideas examined in the book, such as the
microcosm-macrocosm analogy, the four elements, the great chain of
being, the circle of perfection, numerology and the doctrine of signatures,
and God as a geometer come from a pre-mechanistic worldview, assumed
to be an intellectual orthodoxy which was a source of metaphors for
sixteenth-century poets. Nicolson’s last chapters offer a cross-section of
revolutionary theories such as Kepler’s laws, Harvey’s circulation of
blood, Gilbert’s magnetism and Bruno’s infinity of space and assess their
influence on seventeenth-century poetic creativity and metaphoric
language. On the whole, Nicolson’s thesis exhibits hermeneutic sensitivity
to scientific paradigms and cultural realities, combined with methodological
assiduousness in deciphering literary allusions; nevertheless, it sometimes
gives the impression of reducing the role of literature to that of a textual
response to Renaissance science and, generally speaking, of a vehicle for
selected historical information.
While Nicolson enrolls a heterogeneous company of poets into her
critical inquiry, Charles Coffin confines his attention to an antiquarian
perusal of scientific metaphors in the works of John Donne only. What
comes under scrutiny in John Donne and the New Philosophy is mostly
prose works such as Pseudo-Martyr, Ignatius His Conclave, sermons, and
letters, and also poetic works, represented almost exclusively by The
Anniversaries, which, generally speaking, attract the bulk of critical
commentary traditionally arguing the importance of scientific references in
illustrating Donne’s spiritual crisis or the crisis of authority in Donne’s
time. The question of the poet’s personal testimony of doubt is also of
great interest to Coffin since, like many digressive passages in mainstream
critical literature, his research relates Donne’s science-oriented metaphors
to the person of the author. The psychological framing of the books
manifests itself in a romanticizing attitude to poetic expression—
discernible, for example, in comments on the goal of the project. The
frequent allusions to science should, in the words of Coffin, “be read as
the reflection of Donne’s gloomy mind” in order to “get nearer the true
center of his personality” (134). For the poet, science is said to function as
learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his
improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom
pleased” (121).
Scientific Discourse in John Donne's Eschatological Poetry
3
an introspective tool, helpful in the dissection of feelings with the use of
rational judgment, and thus engendering a literary “experience compounded
of passion and deep thinking” (6).
Thus Coffin’s source-documentary approach is underlain by a biographical
method, visible, for instance, in the frequent use of quotes from Donne’s
private letters (the purpose of which in the book is to corroborate his
intellectual curiosity), but also in an introductory chapter on the poet’s
education, which affords a cogent basis for the main argument. In that
chapter, through a comprehensive study of the source materials and
textbooks on natural philosophy which the young poet studied in Oxford
Hall and at Cambridge University, Coffin documents Donne’s familiarity
with the fundamental scientific writings of the Renaissance. Despite
showing in elaborate detail that Donne had been educated in disciplines
such as mathematics, geometry, music, cosmography and alchemy, Coffin
closes the biographical chapter with what I believe to be an unsupported
premise for his analysis, which is to “consider the influence of astronomy
only, because its goes deeper with Donne than that of any other science”
(24). Thus, in the second part of the book, methodically marking out all
the more apparent, often meta-scientific, remarks and names of eminent
scientists mentioned both in Donne’s prose and poetry, Coffin proceeds to
demonstrate that the poet takes cognizance of the Copernican world
scheme. At the same time, not only are the less obvious allusions to
sciences other than astronomy overlooked, but also relatively little space is
devoted to an in-depth analysis of the poetic texts themselves or to an
examination of the cultural context in which they originated.
An important assumption in Coffin’s work is that there is a chasm
between Renaissance science and theology, which Donne purportedly
moralizes in his poetry. In fact, Coffin, after declaring that the scientific
revolution brought about a split between the physical and the metaphysical
realities, expresses Donne’s theological creed in the following words:
“reason teaches truths that have nothing to do with divinity” (288). This
assumption persists in a majority of Donnean criticism, directing it either
towards views about the poet’s linguistic incongruity or his Christian
skepticism. If the commentators do not treat scientific metaphors in Donne
as secular disruptions in metaphysical discourse, they often diminish their
role to haphazardly arranged and purely ornamental devices. According to
James Leishman, such is the essence of metaphysical wit: to play around
with Copernican or Galilean theories in the same way as previous poets
had experimented with language (146). Many critics, like Michael
Moloney, say that Donne adopts scientific concepts only for “rhetorical
effect” (59), be it out of Gongorine voracity for fresh invention, anti-
4
Introduction
conventional backlash against Petrarchan idealism, or the pursuit of a
linguistic equivalent to the mystical unity in multiplicity. Accusations of
inconsistency have been lodged against “the Donne who will say anything
if the poem seems to need it” (Scherer-Hertz 5), the Donne who “does not
really know what he wants or rather wants everything and cannot
harmonize his wants” (Tillyard 304), and the Donne whose “mind is not
grooved to any one way of thinking” (Coffin 20). The presupposition
behind such criticism is often that a metaphor reduced to rhetorical
decoration or arbitrary word choice does not threaten the Christian
integrity of the poem’s religious vision.
On the other hand, a large group of scholars admit that scientific
language is a philosophical aberration in devotional poetics: an intrusive
voice pointing to a conflict between God and science. Herbert Grierson
believes that Donne’s collection of disparate themes—sacred and
profane—attests to the poet’s skepticism about the relativity of human
knowledge pitted against the absolute nature of religious truth (2, XXVII).
Applying a similar dichotomy between natural law and fideistic certitude,
Frank Kermode also emphasizes that Donne’s “rejection of the learning
that depends on unaided human sense is essential to his religion” (117).
Other commentators, for example, Steven Bethel and Masood Ul-Hasan,
observe that, when Donne shows doubts in the possibility of earthly
knowledge through what they understand to be incoherent metaphors, he
fortifies the virtue of faith (87, 21). Continuing this train of thought, Silvio
Policardi invokes Ecclesiastes 1.18 (“increaseth knowledge, increaseth
sorrow” [80]) as a source of Donne’s skepticism about the scientific quest
for truth. In John Demaray’s opinion, Donne, in his mature works, rejects
all meaningless pursuits of the intellect to establish religion as the only
genuine source of knowledge (85). This eulogy of suspended judgment, a
forceful quality of Donne poetics, creates a conscience-stricken dilemma
between faith and reason, asserts Thomas Sloane (passim). Likewise,
Charles Coffin’s claim that “scientific traditions by no means escaped the
sting of Donne’s skepticism” (156) places the poet’s writings within the
philosophical current represented by Sextus Empiricus and Montaigne.
While there can be no doubt about Donne’s inclination towards
skepticism, the dichotomy between science and religion is, in my opinion,
neither the source nor the conclusion of his poetry.
Another assumption that constitutes an overarching backdrop to
Coffin’s approach, and to many other critical works on Donne, is a
contrast between medieval and Renaissance science. Many commentators
follow the path set out by Mary Ramsay’s Les Doctrines Medievales chez
Donne (1917) in believing that Donne’s imagination was shaped entirely
Scientific Discourse in John Donne's Eschatological Poetry
5
by medieval scholasticism, while others declare themselves on the side of
T.S. Eliot and William Empson who envision a Donne steeped in
sixteenth-century science. The first thesis has gained more currency
among literary scholars. Melissa Wanamaker, who analyzes metaphysical
wit in terms of discordia concors, proves that Donne’s metaphors are
typically medieval since, by discovering similitude between phenomena,
they reflect the unifying cosmic order. In John Donne: His Flight from
Medievalism, Michael Moloney (1944) defends Donne’s intrinsic
medievalism against modernistic readings which tend to focus more on
post-Galilean influences than on the scholastic backdrop of his poetry.
James Winny also stresses Donne’s reliance on medieval concepts; in fact,
he insists that all the poetic images are drawn “entirely from the old
philosophy” (87). William Keast voices a similar confidence in the poet’s
susceptibility to scholastic doctrine; on those grounds, he even contrasts
Donne with Cowley, who supposedly draws his store of images only from
the new science (4). Donne’s anachronistic interest in medieval thought
has been explained by an increasing demand for “old lessons from moral
theology” (6) that, according to Arnold Stein, characterized modern
secular culture. On a more aesthetic plane, David Norbrook considers
Donne’s interest in old science and metaphysics an element within his
anti-classical style. Opposed to these interpretations are the less numerous
voices which proclaim that Donne puts sixteenth-century science before
the old world order. Anthony Low, for instance, understands the poet’s
attraction to modern philosophy and his alleged rejection of medieval
authority in the context of the Burkhartian narrative of Renaissance
individualism. Maria Salenius, on the other hand, connects Donne’s
interest in the new learning with his Reformation poetics, presuming
scientific imagery to be an adequate means of expressing the relevance of
the Protestant religion to the modern reader (323).
Another widespread dichotomy customarily applied to Donne’s work,
the conflict between reason and emotion, proceeds from T.S. Eliot’s
influential attempt to define Donne’s poetic originality in terms of the
unresolved tension between immediate experience and absolute truth. On
the one hand, in his Clark lectures, Eliot defines the incongruities of
metaphysical poetry in the light of the “conscious irony of conflict
between feeling and the intellectual interpretation” (36). On the other
hand, the use of intellectual statements in Donne is valorized as an
unconscious alienation from the wholeness of life underlying discursive
fragmentation. Unlike Dante, whose feeling and intellect, according to
Eliot, affords the full apprehension of the world’s continuity, Donne’s
“chaotic intellectual background [results in] … a contraction of the field of
6
Introduction
experience” (75). Hence, although appreciated for “sensualising thought”
and “closing the abstract with all the painful delight of flesh,” (55)
Donne’s scientific imagery, said to bear the traces of “mental disjunction”
and “lack of unity,” is also accused of shattering the world into a plurality
of fragmentary experiences. The impact of Eliot’s definition of
metaphysical poetry has lingered in the following decades of criticism
which have perpetuated the dichotomy between thought and feeling.
Although theoretical contexts for the later studies are not necessarily
steeped in the modernist distrust of Enlightenment reason and in
mythopoeic presuppositions about suspending literature between ideality
and objectivity, these modernistic overtones often determine the general
philosophical spirit of the works from successive decades.
The emphasis on the synthesis of emotion and intellect in Donne
acquired a new critical perspective after the publication of Louis Martz’s
The Poetry of Meditation (1954) which revealed the influences of Ignatius
Loyola’s meditative practices on the structure of metaphysical poetry.
Ignatian exercises intrinsically combine intense passion with analytical
reflection, especially that the tripartite division of meditation into
composition of place, analysis, and colloquy—stages which Martz also
discerns in two quatrains and the sestet of Donne’s sonnets—nominally
reflects the three Augustinian faculties of the soul: memory, understanding
and will. Even though Martz’s thesis has been challenged by revisionist
monographs, for example, by Barbara Kiefer-Lewalski’s Protestant Poetics
and the Poetry of Praise, his influence has remained so considerable that
many twentieth-century critics2 stayed entangled either in reformative
polemics with or in supplementary reaffirmation of Martz. The
legitimization of the antithesis between reason and emotion in the two
salient critical frameworks—Eliot’s and Martz’s—is of great weight for
the discussion of scientific discourse in Donne because it seems that, due
to this wide-spread binarism, the complex cultural and textual implications
of Donne’s inter-disciplinary allusions have escaped the notice of many
scholars who often conservatively or perfunctorily interpret traces of
scientific thinking in his poems to signify a wholeness of selfhood seen
either through Eliot’s or Martz’s model.
The concept of the unity of human experience—presupposed in both
models—has a particular significance for the reading of Donne’s
devotional poetry. Arno Esch’s research into the Divine Poems shows that
Donne is peerless in his balanced conflation of feeling and intellect,
2
For example: Gardner 1952, Kermode 1957, Peterson 1959, Halewood 1970,
Parini 1977, Milward 1979, Stein, Broadbent 1974, Carey 1981, Sherwood 1984,
Alves 1985 and Davies 1994.
Scientific Discourse in John Donne's Eschatological Poetry
7
incorporating a wide circle of human experience into the economical
structure of the sonnet (53). Patrick Grant believes that the interplay of
love and intellect in Donne’s expression of faith “continuously reasserts
tensions inherent in human condition” (“Augustinian Spirituality and the
Holy Sonnets of John Donne” 84). The fusion of intellect and feeling in
Donne’s religious verse has also been noted by Herbert Grierson, who
defines metaphysical poetry as “the peculiar blend of passion and thought,
feeling and ratiocination” (XVI). As Theodore Spencer argues, Donne
taught Eliot the poetic sensibility that grasping the mythological sense of
science, raises emotion from the obscure shadows of passion to the
precision of detached judgment (175). For Steven Bethel, the inclusion of
rational style into devout sonnets combines all levels of experience into
“multiple worlds of human disclosure” (67). Robert Ellrodt, in turn,
mentions thought and emotion in Donne to emphasize the role of
introspection in consolidating a totality of the emerging selfhood (112).
The aim of this book is to examine the role of scientific discourse in
John Donne’s selected eschatological poems from the Songs and Sonnets
and the Divine Poems. The Anniversaries will be excluded from this
discussion because they have already received ample critical attention and
because their genre and subject predetermines a specific use of scientific
references. Similarly, the choice of scientific disciplines will not include
allusions to astronomy, which were thoroughly investigated by Coffin.
Instead I will focus my attention on the more neglected areas of inquiry,
such as geography and cartography (chapter 1), physics (chapter 2), and
chemistry and alchemy (chapter 3). Whereas to date there have been no
publications documenting Donne’s references to physics, geographic
metaphors in Donne’s poetry have been a subject of discussion in a few
articles, namely in Lisa Gorton’s “John Donne’s Use of Space,” published
in 1998 in a special issue of Early Modern Literary Studies, and in Ladan
Niayesh’s “In All flat maps, and I am one: Cartographic References in the
Poems of John Donne,” from a recent (2006) issue of Jussieu, and also in
the chapter, “The Frame of the New Geography” of John Gillies’s
Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (1994). Alchemy in Donne
was studied in an article by Edgar Hill Duncan from a 1942 edition of The
Journal of English Literary History under the title “Donne’s Alchemical
Figures,” also in 1957 Joseph Anthony Mazzeo published an article
entitled “John Donne’s Alchemical Imagery.” In 1996, Stanton J. Linden
devoted a chapter of his book Darke Hierogliphics: Alchemy in English
Literature from Chaucer to the Restoration to the poetry of Donne and
Herbert (“A True Religious Alchimy”), while Eluned Crawshaw
contributed to Smith’s John Donne: Essays in Celebration from 1972 the
8
Introduction
essay “Hermetic Elements in Donne’s Poetic Vision.” My analysis will not
overlap research presented in these authors’ works; nevertheless, their
articles will provide a valuable point of reference for this book.
Methodologically speaking, this research can be inscribed into the
tradition of cross-disciplinary practice incepted by the postmodern shift
from the scientific hegemony of logical positivism and the essentialist bias
of Leavisian criticism to a predominantly aesthetizing approach taken
towards epistemology.3 The renewed interest (after the hermeneutic turn in
the 1950s) in the interdisciplinarity between science and literature
followed the publication of Kuhn’s theory of “paradigm shifts”4 which
makes the case for a theory-laden character to all explanatory frameworks
in science, and ultimately for the cultural and ideological relativity of
scientific claims. A broader perspective on the unverifiable status of any
truth-telling discourse was adopted in Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition
and Foucault’s Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences
(1970), both of which, in arguing the linguistic constructedness and
historical fortuity of privileged metanarratives or epistemes, challenge the
traditional boundaries between academic disciplines. What has also paved
the way for new readings across literature and science is philosophical
works on the significance of metaphor as a figure of thought in scientific
analysis. Take as examples Derrida’s “White Mythology: Metaphor in the
Text of Philosophy” (1972), which shows that metaphor precedes and
inhabits all philosophical discourse, Richard Rorty’s Consequences of
Pragmatism (1982), which defines scientific progress as a history of
changing metaphors, and Gaston Bachelard’s The Formation of the
Scientific Mind (first published 1934, but appropriated by poststructuralist
literary theory in the 1970s), which demonstrates that scientific concepts
are metaphors naturalized in language. As it aligns with critical
epistemologies in philosophy, the examination of the intersecting
vocabularies between science and poetics has become a prominent trend in
postmodern literary studies.
This cross-disciplinary tendency seems to be most marked in the
criticism of the nineteenth-century novel and twentieth-century fiction, but
it can also be observed in the study of early modern literature. The
influence of Darwin’s theory of evolution on positivist imagery5 and the
3
Cf. Knellwolf and Norris 1-17.
The theory was propounded in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first
published in 1964.
5
For example, organicist metaphors, taxonomic descriptions, the image of the web
of affinities.
4
Scientific Discourse in John Donne's Eschatological Poetry
9
narrative structure6 of the Victorian novel has been explored, for example,
by Gillian Beer in Darwin’s Plot: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin,
George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983) and George Levine
in Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction
(1988). Such titles as Strange Attractors: Literature, Culture and Chaos
Theory (1995) by Harriett Hawkins, The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field
Models and Narrative Strategies in the Twentieth Century by Katherine
Hayles and The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science: Towards a
Disciplinary Intellectual History by John Limon, employ notions from
quantum mechanics, biophysics, quantum field theory and chaos theory as
parts of a critical approach to postmodern fiction.
As far as Renaissance studies are concerned, the interest in scientific
imagery often constitutes a part of a Foucauldian cultural-materialistic
critique. Juliet Cummins and David Burchell in Science, Literature and
Rhetoric in Early Modern England and Elizabeth Spiller in Science,
Reading and Renaissance Literature: The Art of Making Knowledge, for
example, analyze seventeenth-century literary production in relation to
scientific inquiry to show how Renaissance knowledge was institutionalized
through social practices. A special field of research into the early modern
embodiments of knowledge is the science of anatomy and its various
textualities. Such books as The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the
Human Body in Renaissance Culture by Jonathan Sawday and The Body
in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe by David
Hillman and Carla Mazzio, focus on anatomic discourse in search of
corporeal articulations of subjectivity and the aesthetics of dismemberment
in the textual spaces of the Renaissance. Other critical works on early
modern scientific discourses view the cultural histories of knowledgepower structures through a postcolonial optic: John Gillies’s survey of
geographic references in Shakespeare in Shakespeare and the Geography
of Difference links cultural methodology with an ethico-political
consideration of otherness, while Stephanie Moss and Kaara Peterson in
Disease, Diagnosis and Cure on the Early Modern Stage, which decodes
textual allusions to Galenian and Paracelsian medicine, discuss the politics
of estrangement and the taxonomies of racial difference in Renaissance
drama. An interesting application of science studies to the revaluation of
early modern theatre is undertaken in Henry S. Turner’s The English
Renaissance Space: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts
1580-1630 and Angus Fletcher’s Time, Space and Motion in the Age of
Shakespeare. Turner extends his scope of analysis beyond the institutional
6
For example, plot advancing according to the rules of categorization, divergence
and variability.
10
Introduction
realities of the theatre into the conventions and technologies of
performance, which he investigates through such scientific theories as
applied mathematics, Albertian perspective and cartographic projection,
on the assumption that the adaptation of optical and geometrical sciences
to stage production enabled the cultural expansion of Elizabethan and
Jacobean drama as a spatial mode of art. Fletcher explores action and
movement on the Renaissance stage through the then contemporary kinetic
theories of chaos, inwardness and discontinuity.
Like the aforementioned works, this book uses the methodological
concepts that underwrite the critical ideologies of cultural materialism and
the New Historicism. My objective is to delineate contexts of the
negotiation and the circulation of meaning between the discursive fields of
literature and science in accordance with the more general critical
tendency to relocate the study of poetry in a broader field of cultural
processes. In contrast to those commentaries on Donne which, like John
Coffin’s monograph, rely on the binarism between literary truth and
scientific fact, this study does not presuppose a correspondence model of
truth, but rather describes areas of semiotic exchange between different
modes of writing and cultural forces. For that purpose, I will read Donne’s
eschatological poetry alongside Renaissance textual and visual scientific
cultures represented by scientific treatises, textbooks on natural
philosophy, emblematic engravings and woodcuts, paintings, atlases and
maps and alchemical illustrations. Because such an interpretative model
historicizes its perspective on poetic meaning it circumvents the
universalistic dichotomy of emotion and reason which undergirds Eliotean
criticism, and it reaches beyond the closed circuit of linguistic
referentiality within which critics such as Rugoff evaluate Donne’s
metaphorics. In the spirit of the New Historicism, this analysis is meant to
employ its theoretical motivations and historical contingencies to establish
itself as a strategic reconstruction of the past translated through the postKuhnian model. The aim of my work is to interpret Donne through the
lens of the new histories of science, challenging the boundaries between
the mechanistic worldview and medieval thought, on the one hand, and
theological orthodoxy and epistemic naturalism, on the other.
Despite the inspiration I seek from new historicist approaches, my
analysis is not a fundamentalist cultural materialist inquiry. The focus of
the book is on the master tropes and cultural artifacts embedded in early
modern narratives, but not the economic conditions of literary production
and consumption or political practices of cultural institutions. Nor is this
work a strong descriptivist pursuit of radical indeterminacies and antimetaphysical stipulations. I deploy some elements of close reading and
Scientific Discourse in John Donne's Eschatological Poetry
11
post-structural analysis in pursuit of the sensitive juncture between the
shifting forms of literariness and the textual crystallizations of the past
recreated in the language of Renaissance poetry, thereby discarding all the
psychological motivation that so captivates the interest of critics from
Coffin to Carey. To some extent, this book also draws on the outdated
methodologies of archivistic historicism and the history of ideas, so the
use of source materials and of a comparative standpoint (still, without the
trans-historical perspective) will try to bring into view some philosophical
and scientific concepts recorded in literature. At the same time, I will
endeavor not to lose sight of the literary content of Donne’s verses, so
each text will be analyzed as an independent whole in which the scientific
allusion forms part of a rhetorically intricate and intellectually
premeditated lyrical construction.
Owing to my interest in the elusive value of literariness and its
interplay with scientific knowledge, I will concentrate on the subject of
death, the intermediate state which Saint Augustine, the philosophical
patron of the Donnean religious sensitivity and tropological
resourcefulness, deems a point unidentifiable in time and space, something
that does not exist (Confessions, 85). My emphasis will not be on
metaphors derived from science, but on the role of these metaphors in
representing death, a state which resists human cognition and opposes the
laws of logic. Taking on this perspective, this analysis will focus on the
meeting of two seemingly antonymic discourses—the scientific revolution
and the Christian theology—in the space of Donne’s eschatological poetry.
I think the problem so formulated will allow me to trace the convergences
that emerge between scientific theorems and religious truths on conceptual
and linguistic levels. This study will be mainly concerned with the role
that rational or even mechanistic science plays in conveying eschatological
paradoxes and in describing the unspeakable experience of dying. I am
also interested in ascertaining to what extent the opposition between the
Old and the New Science may be relevant to the analysis of Donne’s
representation of death and mortality. Lastly, the aim of this book will be
to evaluate the play of heterogeneous discourses and the cooperation of
irreconcilable paradigms in Donne with respect to the question of
rhetorical congruence.
CHAPTER ONE
GEOGRAPHY AND CARTOGRAPHY
INTRODUCTION
Geography developed in the sixteenth century from the more general
cosmography into an autonomous scientific discipline, being subdivided in
the seventeenth century into three separate sciences: mathematical
geography, descriptive geography and chorography. As Lesley Cormack
shows, at that time a knowledge of geography constituted both a
significant component of the Arts Curriculum at Oxford and Cambridge
and an important requirement for a cultured gentleman embarking on a
public career. Cormack attributes the increasing value placed on
geography in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to multifaceted social
and political transformations: the nascent ideology of colonial imperialism
thriving among the governing elite, the nationalistic understructure of the
expanding institutions of patronage and governorship, and the
empowerment of the gentry along with a subsequent propagation of the
philosophies of rationalism and mercantilism (14-15). With Western
Europe replacing Jerusalem as the centre of the world, and with the blank
continents of the two Americas offering themselves as potential colonies,
the early modern geographical representation of the world was appropriated
as a tool of political and educational control to reinforce the English sense
of nationhood and co-create the narrative of unchallenged British
supremacy.
Although the rational narrative that governed early modern cartography
was dictated by empirical plausibility and imperialistic ambitions, the most
widely published maps in the sixteenth century were still very much
immersed in theological concerns. Despite the scientific meticulousness
that brought Gerardus Mercator such esteem, in a 30-page treatise entitled
“The Book of the Creation and Fabric of the World,” opening his famous
Atlas (1590), he declared that the central aim of his work was to reveal the
splendour of God’s creation and to guide “the way to more high and
eternal matters” (qtd. in Cosgrove 156). Mercator was not alone among
Renaissance mapmakers in that goal. As Frank Lestringant argues,
“cosmographical meditations from Vadianus to Mercator made the
14
Chapter One
contemplation of the atlas one of the privileged means of access to an
understanding of the Scriptures” (7). Sebastian Münster, like Mercator,
conceived his Cosmographia (1544) as a spiritual exercise; he even
promoted the use of mnemonic devices to commit world maps to memory
for use in meditation on the moral order of the world. Thus mimicking the
formal structure of meditational practices, Münster employed in his atlas
the compositional method of periegesis in order to take the reader on a
vicarious pilgrimage through the mapped lands and encourage a devout
contemplation of the planisphere (McLean 194).
Another sixteenth-century cartographer, Richard Hakluyt, shared
Münster’s goal of re-Christianizing geography, which was becoming
gradually detached from metaphysical underpinnings. Hakluyt, simultaneously
an Anglican chaplain and a propagandist for England’s imperial expansion,
supplemented his Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the
English Nation (1600) with a world map that combined the pious goal of
depicting the universality of Christendom with the colonial intention of
bringing “Christian religion to such people as yet live in darkness” (qtd. in
Mancall 260). Münster, Hakluyt, and many other Protestant mapmakers
who endeavoured to safeguard the geopolitics of the Christian empire
often decorated the niches of stereographic space with religious
marginalia, yet possibly no one used Christian iconography as copiously
as Jodocus Hondius. The bottom frame of Hondius’s “Christian Knight
Map of the World” (c. 1596) was populated with allegorical figures
rendered in the tradition of a morality play: Death, World, Devil, Flesh;
and glossed with a passage from the Bible: “what does it profit a man to
gain the whole world if he lose his own soul?” (Matt. 16:26). Through this
gallery of religious symbols, Hondius emphasised that the world,
incidentally portrayed with the greatest scientific accuracy, remained a site
of spiritual struggle and of satanic temptation.
Lastly, Abraham Ortelius, the author of the first modern atlas,
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570), alerted the reader to the emblematic
meaning of the world through references to Christian Neo-Stoicism
(Delano-Smith 58). Ortelius’s cartouche carried inscriptions from Seneca
(“O how ridiculous are the boundaries of mortals”) and Cicero (“For what
can seem of moment in human affairs for him who keeps all eternity
before his eyes and knows the scale of the universal world?”), which laid
bare the significance of the global vision of the world. The moral
reflection on cosmic magnitude contained in that geographic theatrum
mundi integrated the humanist idea of tolerance with the Stoic postulate of
ataraxia. This casts light on why Erasmus, from whom Ortelius adopted a
humanistic view on Christian beliefs (Kruyfhooft 18), deemed geography
Geography and Cartography
15
a necessary prologue to apprehending the religious “coordinates of
humanism” (Crane 432). That Ortelius’s world map was assigned spiritual
responsibilities, probably beyond original intent, is seen, for example, in
its selection to illustrate Genesis in the Haarlem Bible of 1598. In general,
such harmonious coexistence of rational measurement and metaphysical
thought in all the aforementioned early modern world maps and atlases
corroborates John Short’s thesis that in the sixteenth century “there was no
rift between the new spatial discourses and religious beliefs” (155).
Another reason why transcendental values became inscribed in the
science of cartography and geography was the appropriation of Ptolemy’s
Geographia by the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition. The ancient manuscript
was recaptured from Constantinople and brought to Florence at the
beginning of the fifteenth century, when, in the words of Heninger,
“mathematical studies were generally taking on a new significance” (341).
Soon the book proved to be equally attractive for the both the Christian
Church and Platonic philosophers. At approximately the same time that
Pope Pius II, having given the Ptolemaic atlas the official stamp of
approval of the Roman Church, was seeding a Cosmographia (1477) of
his own authorship with abundant references to Ptolemy (Scafi 245),
Berlinghieri in 1482 was adapting the Geographia into Dantean verse and
incorporating into that Alexandrian treatise mystical topics related to
Ficinian philosophy and humanistic commentaries on moral themes
(Skelton 1-14). Especially important to Neoplatonic cosmography was the
rediscovery of the Ptolemaic grid. In the view of Platonizing philosophers,
geometry, the tool of the cartographic projection, was the means by which
God had created the universe. Therefore a perfection of invisible
geometrical relations was said to inhere in this world, itself a reflection of
the archetypal idea in the mind of God, the geometer. Cartographic
projection reveals that incorruptible geometric order, not the material
imperfection of the cosmos. Moreover, the Ptolemaic grid sanctioned a
mode of vision parallel to the celestial vision of a soul in heaven. The
motif of the Neoplatonic ascent of the soul through the terrestrial, celestial,
and supercelestial spheres of the Ptolemaic cosmos1 and of the soul’s
beatific vision of the cosmic harmony from the highest sphere, caelestis
mundus, involves the same positioning of the spectator as is presupposed
by the cartographer’s gaze.
The Ptolemaic perspective creates a union between the subcelestial and
the celestial realm not only because it renders the heavens to the human
eye, “fixing the abstract grid to the spherical earth by the same
1
This motif appears in the works of Mirandola, Reuchlin, and Fludd, among
others.
16
Chapter One
mathematics of longitude and latitude by which the ancient Greeks located
the stars in the sky,” (Edgerton 12) but also because the logic of ocular
vision it uses harkens back to those medieval opticians who trusted that a
spiritual relationship existed between the perpendicular visual axis and the
grace of God.2 Explaining the cartographer’s projection from a fixed
eyepoint, Ptolemy established a point of sight which marks the center of
the viewer’s visual field and the center of the oikumene, and in so doing he
connected the spheres of earth, heaven and eye by a vertical visual ray.
The spiritual meaning of this ocular axis becomes apparent in those
cartographic works that were openly inspired by Pythagorean metaphysics,
for example, Mercator’s Typus vel Symbolum Universitatis, wherein,
according to Cosgrove, “resolving different modes of vision through the
mathematics of spherical projection was as much a geopolitical as a
spiritual act” (113).
GOOD FRIDAY, 1613, RIDING WESTWARD
Let man’s soul be a sphere, and then, in this,
Th’ intelligence that moves, devotion is ;
And as the other spheres, by being grown
Subject to foreign motion, lose their own,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a year their natural form obey ;
Pleasure or business, so, our souls admit
For their first mover, and are whirl’d by it.
Hence is’t, that I am carried towards the west,
This day, when my soul’s form bends to the East.
There I should see a Sun by rising set,
And by that setting endless day beget.
But that Christ on His cross did rise and fall,
Sin had eternally benighted all.
Yet dare I almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for me.
Who sees Gods face, that is self-life, must die ;
What a death were it then to see God die?
It made His own lieutenant, Nature, shrink,
It made His footstool crack, and the sun wink.
Could I behold those hands, which span the poles
And tune all spheres at once, pierced with those holes ?
Could I behold that endless height, which is
2
For example, according to Roger Bacon, God’s grace reaches devout men
perpendicularly like light enters glass; sinners’ souls, however, refract the light of
God’s grace.
Geography and Cartography
17
Zenith to us and our antipodes,
Humbled below us ? or that blood, which is
The seat of all our soul’s, if not of His,
Made dirt of dust, or that flesh which was worn
By God for His apparel, ragg’d and torn ?
If on these things I durst not look, durst I
On His distressed Mother cast mine eye,
Who was God’s partner here, and furnish’d thus
Half of that sacrifice which ransom’d us ?
Though these things as I ride be from mine eye,
They’re present yet unto my memory,
For that looks towards them ; and Thou look’st towards me,
O Saviour, as Thou hang’st upon the tree.
I turn my back to thee but to receive
Corrections till Thy mercies bid Thee leave.
O think me worth Thine anger, punish me,
Burn off my rust, and my deformity ;
Restore Thine image, so much, by Thy grace,
That Thou mayst know me, and I’ll turn my face.
In the ninth book of Timaeus, Plato puts forward an imperative to
observe the intelligences governing the cosmos in an epistemological
pursuit of self knowledge: “God invented and gave us sight to the end that
we might behold the courses of intelligence in the heaven, and apply them
to the courses of our own intelligence which are akin to them” (76). When
the westward rider from Donne’s “Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward”
embarks on a gnoseological quest, he also starts from a meditation on the
structure of the heavens. It seems to be not the Copernican cosmos of the
early seventeenth century that he conjures up, however, but the universe
imagined as an old-fashioned scientific construct. In the first sentence of
the poem: “Let man’s soul be a sphere, and then, in this, Th’ intelligence
that moves, devotion is,” presuming the linguistic and logical form of a
geometrical theorem (evidenced by the use of words: “let … be”), Donne
establishes a reference to the geocentric, Neo-Platonized cosmology of
Aristotle and Ptolemy, and he concurrently suspends this reference within
the conjectural structure of a scientific hypothesis. Such equivocal reliance
on scientific knowledge persists in the subsequent part of the meditation,
which dramatizes the scene of the Crucifixion at the intersection of
physical, geometrical and transcendental spatialities. Throughout the
poem, the ambiguous relationship between the opening vision of the
Ptolemaic universe and the Renaissance cartography of western expansion,
global cosmographic scale, and the optics of perspectival projection,
enframes the theological mystery of Christ’s death on the Cross.
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Chapter One
The first section of “Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward figured in
astronomical imagery, addresses the Neoplatonic theme of the doctrine of
correspondences, wherein the “intelligence” or the controlling angel which
sets each of the eight heavenly spheres in motion is analogized with
religious devotion as an external agent which animates the human soul.
The traveller’s soul, nevertheless, reverses from east to west as it becomes
subject to the influences of “pleasure” and “business,” surpassing the
attractive force of faith. In the Ptolemaic world system, an equivalent
change of motion occurs when the sphere’s trajectory is altered by the
movement of other spheres, asserts Donne, who by 1613 must have known
that this theory had been introduced by Ptolemy only to camouflage
ostensible mistakes in his all-encompassing paradigm, which had not
accounted for the observable retrograde motion of the planets along the
epicycle:
And as the other spheres, by being grown
Subject to foreign motion, lose their own,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a year their natural form obey;
Pleasure or business, so, our souls admit
For their first mover, and are whirl’d by it.
Still, it is not astronomical accuracy but the philosophical background
of Ptolemaic cosmology and its interpretations that the rider contemplates
in his retrograde journey. The moral significance of the “spherical
analogy” (334) has been comprehensively explained by Alexander
Chambers. The point of origin for Donne’s conceit, he writes, is Timaeus’s
description of the genesis of the world, in which lesser demiurges create
man in the image of the universe endowing his soul with twofold motion:
the circle of the Same rules the rational soul, while the circle of the
Other—the sensible soul. Chambers establishes by numerous examples
from the works of Plotinus, Chalcidius, Pseudo-Aquinas, Bonaventura and
Avicenna, through Ficino, Agrippa and Bruno, to Kepler and Hall that the
theme of the revolutions of the soul’s duos orbes was commonplace in
philosophical discussions on the conflict between passion and reason and
on the supremacy of moral virtue (334-340). Such is also the moral
context of Donne’s analogy, as his rider is torn by opposing impulses: the
sensuous appetite to set off on a secular journey on Good Friday, on the
one hand, and the voice of the rational soul ordering him to follow the
Christian path of salvation and turn his eyes toward the scene at Golgotha,
on the other.
Geography and Cartography
19
Astronomical imagery, on which Chambers focuses his analysis,
dominates in the introductory passage of the poem, but the middle lines
and the main fabric of the text are steeped in geographic and cartographic
imagery, which structures the moral premises and the organization of
space in the text. In the next line, “I am carried toward the West this day,
when my souls form bends towards the East the I-speaker envisions the
conflict between his allegiance to religious piety and his faithfulness to
world duties in terms of the tension between two cardinal points of the
compass: east and west. The rider is torn between these two vectors of
space: his body is riding towards the west, which symbolizes the sphere of
earthly ambitions, while his soul is bending towards the east, which
symbolizes the sphere of pious devotion. Thus, this peregrination occurs
within conflicting orders of spatiality and, I believe, incongruous
cartographical modes. The attribution of moral value to eastward
movement can be explained in terms of the symbolic space of a medieval
map, which, subordinating chorographical accuracy to moral didacticism,
privileges the east as the location of Jerusalem and of Earthly Paradise. As
in medieval pilgrimage guides and travel narratives, the sacred destination
of the I-speaker’s journey is situated in the east of the world, where the
holy land intersects with the promised city at the axis mundi.
Joan Hartwig notices that the depiction of the rider in Donne’s poem
recalls the pictorial convention of representing the conversion of St. Paul,
who, while riding horseback to Damascus, saw the vision of Christ.
Caravaggio, Michelangelo and Cranach (see fig. 1) use the stock
association of the rider as the soul and the horse as the body in their
renderings of St. Paul; Hartwig believes that the same symbolism can be
found in Donne’s poem (270). Indeed, as the rider (his soul) wishes to be
carried towards the east, the horse (the rider’s body) travels towards the
west. The western direction has an ambiguous cartographic meaning; it is
disparaged in old maps as the direction of spiritual decay (the sin that
“eternally benighted all”), but favoured in modern atlases as a site of
financial enterprises and colonial desires (“pleasure or business”). The
projection of the traveller’s moral dilemma onto disparate cartographical
surfaces highlights his sense of disorientation: not only is the peregrinus
drawn in two morally opposite directions but the cartographic space he
relates to also undergoes constant transformation.
20
Chapter One
Fig. 1. Lucas Cranach The Elder, The Crucifixion with the Converted Centurion,
1536, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.